"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

As I’ve often explained, online dating is for losers. The very fact that somebody is trying to hook up via an Internet site or smartphone app tells you that nobody they actually know in real life is willing to date them. Guys who engage in online dating are a bunch of desperate creeps, sorting through a discount bargain-basement selection of lonely women with personality flaws and psychiatric issues. If you ever see a good-looking person on a dating site, ask yourself: Why has this person been unable to find a stable, healthy and enduring relationship? There must be something wrong with these people, you see, and if this is true of heterosexuals in the online dating world, does anyone imagine that things are better when the LGBT community does online dating?

Left to right: Lorenco Gjegji, Joshua Blanchard, Cade Ford.

HAVERHILL, Mass. — Five teenagers are being held without bail in the case of a vicious beating in a remote area of Haverhill.
According to a police report, a teen victim said he was lured into the violent ambush by one of the suspects he had met on the popular dating-app Grindr.
19-year-old Lorenco Gjegji, of Haverhill, reportedly picked up the victim with one of the other suspects, 18-year-old Joshua Blanchard, of Haverhill.
Police say the victim told officers he thought he was being taken to the Millvale Reservoir to smoke marijuana.
It wasn’t long before the encounter took an unexpected turn. Shortly after parking by the woods, two additional cars pulled up behind them.Several more teens, ages 18 and 19, got out of those vehicles and things escalated quickly.
Court documents describe the victim being dragged out the car and beaten with a baton. He was also repeatedly punched and kicked.
The two teens who had picked him up earlier in the evening are alleged to have been involved in setting up the calculated and vicious attack.
Those suspects reportedly stole the victim’s Air Jordan sneakers, $140 in cash as well as his cell phone. They then allegedly kidnapped the victim, driving him to Lawrence in an effort to score marijuana. . . .
Along with Gjegji and Blanchard, 18-year-old Cade Ford, of Haverhill, 19-year-old Joseph Clohisy, of Haverhill, and 18-year-old Richard Pedro, of Methuen, are also charged in the crime.
All five suspects have been arraigned on charges of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, kidnapping and armed robbery.

Was this a “hate crime”? Were the guys who beat up, robbed and kidnapped the victim also members of the LGBT community? We don’t know. This looks like a 21st-century versions of what used to be a rather common sort of crime back in the 1970s, when gay guys were known to “cruise” certain parks and other public places, and would occasionally get mugged by young hoodlums looking for an easy mark. Being a juvenile delinquent myself, I used to hear some of my dopehead hoodlum buddies laugh about how they had “rolled a queer” in Atlanta’s Piedmont Park, which was the locally notorious “cruising” area back in the day. Violence was never my thing, personally, but when you’re a teenage dopehead, you get used to the fact that many of your acquaintances are just evil.

Having been around a lot of evil people at such a young age — I was dealing dope before I was old enough to get a driver’s license — tends to make you cynical about human nature. However “civilized” we might imagine ourselves to be, we are never far away from savagery, and if you go trolling around for cheap thrills, you put yourself at risk of encountering evil people. Let’s put it this way: If Jeffrey Dahmer were alive today, he’d definitely be on Grindr, and so would his victims.

The victim of the Haverhill hoodlums is lucky to be alive, and if these thugs hadn’t been caught, how many more people would they have victimized? As it is, I’m guessing the perpetrators will spend quite a while in prison, where they are certain to have their chance to, uh, become members of the LGBT community. Probably not in a fun way, either.

Warn your kids: Don’t date online. Bad things could happen.

UPDATE: While the news item that prompted this post was about a teenager on a gay dating app, I wish to emphasize that all online dating suffers from the same basic dangers. Our tendency toward superficiality, to judge people based on appearances, is a major part of the problem. In December I wrote a lengthy article entitled “Pretty Poison” which dealt with this issue: We tend to believe that people who look good are good, and this puts us at risk in many different ways.